Canadian politicians need to trust the wisdom of well-informed voters

We still don’t know what kind of cancer killed Jack Layton, and it seems we may never. “I think that [I’m] even more convinced that it was the right decision [not to disclose it],” his widow Olivia Chow recently told Canadian Press. “We don’t need to go into what kind of cancer because those people that have that kind of cancer will not react well, and why inflict that on people?”

This remains an odd line of reasoning. If cancer-sufferers who shared Mr. Layton’s diagnosis might have been discouraged by his rapid decline, you would think the majority who unknowingly didn’t share his diagnosis would be equally worried. But it hardly matters now. The important question, on which Canadians disagree quite vigorously, is whether we were owed some insight into Mr. Layton’s health before going to the polls in 2011.

To my mind, the answer is simple: Politicians have no obligation to disclose health problems, or indeed anything else about their personal lives. The party nomination process, the adversarial nature of the campaign trail and media scrutiny should take care of it; and if not, the voters will decide. If an MP takes his seat and promptly checks himself into the hospital for a pre-existing medical condition, his constituents will decide if they ought to have been told. It’s not scientific. Democracy sorts it out for you.

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The debate over whether such matters should be fair game for the media is somewhat bizarre. Voters, quite properly not trusting everything (or anything) they hear on the campaign trail, want an idea of what a leader might do in a given situation — a budget crisis, a terrorist attack, whatever. It’s the media’s role to provide clues. If a politician’s youthful shenanigans, driving record, tax situation, master’s thesis and inhalation of illicit substances are important, surely the fact he might die within weeks of being elected must be important as well.

In theory, perhaps, this is less crucial in a parliamentary system than for voters who directly elect a President: Officially, none of us votes for anyone other than our local MP. But in practice it’s far more complicated: Unofficially, but consciously and meaningfully, many of us vote for a party leader, a potential prime minster who if incapacitated would be replaced by an unknown person who might react very differently to a budget crisis or terrorist attack. To say that health concerns are off-limits is to suggest that it doesn’t really matter who sits in the seats in the legislature in question.

And sometimes, it clearly doesn’t matter: A good many of Quebec’s New Democrat MPs elected under Mr. Layton’s banner could just as easily have been wax sculptures of themselves. Famously, a few even struggled to speak French. Voters nevertheless felt them qualified to play their part in a historic repudiation of the Bloc Québécois, as well as the non-NDP federalist options. Some bemoaned the idea of people casting uninformed votes; but it’s tough to think of a more meaningful vote than that of a francophone former BQ supporter who casts a ballot for a 21-year-old anglophone nobody.

That somewhat embarrassing moment in the history of officially sovereigntist political parties may partially inform the latest salvo in Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois’ ongoing Cavalcade of Offensive Proposals: She wants mandatory French-language proficiency tests for people wishing to run for any kind of public office. The party flip-flopped on her behalf soon afterwards, but it was never a very realistic proposal in the first place. The idea itself is what’s interesting. Basically, while asking people to vote for her and her candidates, she was impugning their common sense.

Clearly it’s part of the PQ game plan to denigrate minorities, but it makes no more sense to elect someone to Shawinigan’s city council who can’t speak French than to elect someone to Toronto’s who can’t speak English. Either she doubts her fellow citizens are smart enough not to make such a weird mistake, or she realizes that the entire political class has debased itself to the point that people might very well make such a decision deliberately, in order to express their extreme dissatisfaction with every other option — which is a perfectly legitimate vote to cast, by the way. It’s one from which the New Democrats benefited enormously. Yet more evidence, though Ms. Marois would no doubt disagree, of the wisdom of well-informed voters.

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